In this video we talk through a simple and effective technique for sharing relevant industry content with you social media audience. The tools and techniques discussed will help you run your social campaigns efficiently and gain more followers and engagement.

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Transcription:

Hi, I’m Daniel Rowles from Target Internet, and in this video we’re going to talk about content curation. I’m going to start off defining what we mean by content curation. We’ll talk about how that fits in with your content marketing. Then I’ll show you some very practical hands-on tools that you can use to go through your content curation process.

Let’s start by talking about what content curation really is. Within content marketing, what we’re normally trying to do is find content we can use to engage with our audiences. What it doesn’t always need to be is original content that we’ve created. What we might also be doing is pointing out other people’s content that could be useful and commenting on that in some way.

In a very noisy environment say, for example, you’re using Twitter. There’s an awful lot of noise. There are a lot of people you could be following. One way of providing value is to look at all the content in a particular industry and filter that content and curate it. Maybe point out here’s a useful report. This is a good guy. This is a useful blog post, and so on.

If I look at my Twitter account, probably about 50% of what I talk about is other people’s content, so pointing out other people’s content, adding some value by commenting on it in some way. And that provides value to my audience because they know they can come to me and I’ll filter and curate that content for them.

There’s a really easy and practical kind of cheat for doing this. First of all, you might be familiar with Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a tool that allows you to basically manage multiple social media profiles from one place. You can have your Facebook and your LinkedIn and your Twitter, and you can manage all of them there without having to log in and out of those different accounts. Hootsuite is a great tool definitely worth looking at. There’s a free account and some paid for versions as well.

But what you can do with Hootsuite is you can schedule content to go out in the future. You could write a number of tweets and schedule those to go out. That’s really good. We’ll use that in just a moment.

Another tool that we can use in combination with this is Feedly. Feedly is a great tool if you want to stay up to date with anything. Feedly allows you to bring together blog posts and news sources into one place. I can go into Feedly. I can search on the topic of digital marketing, for example, and I can find all of the best sources of information digital marketing. I can follow a number of those different blogs and news websites. It’s going to bring all the content into one place for me. There’s then an app that you can use on your phone. It means I can dip into Feedly, and I can stay up to date very easily with any particular topic, whether that is digital marketing or celebrity gossip or anything else in between.

So I’ve got Feedly, and I’m finding sources of information. If you have a premium Feedly account, you get some extra sharing buttons. So that’s standard. You can go in. You can find a news source, a piece of content, and you could tweet that or you could post it through to Facebook.

But what these extra buttons will allow you to do is to take that content and send it through to something like Hootsuite. The premium account is only $5 a month, five US dollars. It’s very cheap, and I get my Hootsuite button. This is the really useful bit. I can go through. I can find a number of different bits of content that are useful. I can hit the Hootsuite button, and it’s going to write a tweet for me automatically. It will take the headline. It will shorten the URL. So I use my Hootsuite URL shortener to make that link a lot shorter so it fits into my tweet. If I hit the auto schedule button, it’s then going to drop it into my schedule in Hootsuite.

So rather than me just hitting tweet, tweet, tweet and sending out five tweets in quick succession, what this is going to do is spread my tweets throughout the day. There’s a setting within Hootsuite that what it’s allowing me to do is say no more than ten tweets a day, and that can be between 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. The auto schedule is going to stick in these tweets throughout my day into my schedule. When the day fills up, it will then start dropping them into the next day.

It’s a really good way of using two tools together, Hootsuite and Feedly. Feedly is a good way of staying up to date with anything that you want to stay up to date with anyway. I can find content, and I can post that through and share that with my social audience. I’m curating the content.

What you need to be really careful of here is that you’re not just sharing everything and adding no value. What you’re doing in this curation process is picking out the news that’s really important to your audience and adding some commentary. “This is important.” “I thought this was interesting.” “I don’t agree with this,” whatever that commentary may be. You’re creating the content through to your audience, and you’re providing value by filtering all the noise that’s out there.

So that very much fits in with your content marketing, because through content marketing we’re providing value through content, some of which will be our own content. But also some of that content is the broader industry content that’s important to our target audience. So make sure you think about in your content marketing how you’re providing value through your content, but also curating the industry content that you work in to filter the noise and provide value to your audience.

I hope you found this video useful. Please subscribe if you did. I’ll see you again on targetinternet.com.